The exhibition that emerged around the contextualization of Juan Gris's work proposes a vision of Cubism alternative to that of traditional historiography.
Although the importance of this movement is vital for contemporary art, it is usually identified exclusively with Braque and Picasso, as well as limited to the artistic environment of Paris and World War I. However, there were other cubisms that gathered the different proposals of French, Latin American, and Spanish artists.
Juan Gris is one of the best representatives of these other cubisms. His work is not only important for the continuity it represents in the cubist movement after 1918, but it is also fundamental for connecting the development of modernity in Europe with Latin America.
On this occasion, visits can be organized around two fundamental themes of this movement:
The portrait, where the aim is to understand the different types of portraits: close-up or bust, medium shot or torso, full shot or full-length figure, etc. The importance of clothing for the portrait. The physical and psychological representation of a character. The title of the work—what can be known about the subject through the title of the painting?
The relationship of cubism with the different artistic expressions of the era (music, literature, performing arts) and describing somewhat the panorama in which cubist painters moved.
The still life where light and objects are the protagonists; glasses, bottles, furniture, newspapers... The windows that can be interpreted as the serene and metaphorical counterposition between the two worlds that make up the artist's vision: interior and exterior—art and life—in the borderland of the open window.
Opening hours:From Tuesday to Friday. School period, From 10:00 to 14:00 hours
Duration:90 minutes
Capacity:Minimum groups of 8 students and maximum of 25 or class group. Up to two groups are allowed at the same time and day
Type of activity:Workshop visit, Mediation
Modality:At the museum
Price:Gratuito previa reserva
Related exhibition
Telefónica Cubist Collection
30.09.2014
-
11.01.2015
Cubism was more than an avant-garde movement; it was the artistic movement that inaugurated modernity. There was not a single cubism but many cubisms. Founded in Paris at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century by Braque and Picasso, its temporal limits extend beyond the 1920s, when other artists joined to redefine it.Cubism proposes a revolutionary way of painting based on an intense work of deconstructing reality, of renouncing conventional perspective, of absence of details and of geometrizing forms. By modifying the way of depicting the nature of everyday objects, cubism changed forever the way of looking at painting: now the viewer must traverse planes, lines and colors, arranged according to their own rhythm that demands not only sensory contemplation, but also an intellectual exercise of reconstruction. An aesthetic legacy that has endured over time.The exhibition is structured in three areas. We open the exhibition with the work of contemporary artists who worked in Paris, the vision of other cubisms, and we close the exhibition with the international expansion of the movement, reflected in the presence of Spanish and Latin American artists. The nucleus of the collection, which occupies the central space of the exhibition, consists of 11 exceptional pieces by the Madrid-born artist Juan Gris.Juan Gris is the painter of mystical geometry and this is how Eusebio Sempere discovers and admires him when in 1977 he acquires, with great economic effort, the canvas Still Life with Napkin that we preserve in the Art of the Twentieth Century Collection of this Museum of Contemporary Art in Alicante (MACA) and which became the first Juan Gris exhibited in a Spanish public collection. This exhibition serves as a tribute to such generosity.
